I haven’t been writing much, so here’s why, in the by-now-traditional sets of five bullet points.

Stuff that’s been turning out OK over the past few weeks:

Dropbox has been handling the entire contents of this site pretty damn near flawlessly, so wherever I sit I can just open a file and start typing away, either to add a new entry or to edit old ones.

In one of those half-hour coding sprints that sometimes you just need to do to relax and clear your mind, I built a “little helper” that grabs my Google Reader notes and gives me a nice, Ajaxy page with them formatted in Textile markup syntax, ready to cut and paste into the umpteen resource tables I maintain on this site whenever required (next up I’ll be extending that to doing the actual insertion, but right now I prefer manual control).

I’ve been catching up on TV and movies (trying to rest and watch something at least once a week while the kid’s asleep) – this is alternating with books, although Autumn is always a time where I put aside reading to some extent and focus on sitting snugly in front of this age’s equivalent of a fireplace, watching great tales unfold among flickers of light.

Some of my friends have been great company (although I haven’t really spent any time with them – or the ones I don’t see that often – outside work, which sucks).

Stuff that hasn’t been turning out that well:

Can’t spend enough time with my kid (and it shows – the most I’ve spent with him is when he has nightmares and wakes us up in the middle of the night).

Have been feeling somewhat sick (all of it stress-related aches and pains).

Haven’t been able to rebuild our family photo archive (backups are good, but it still takes time to rebuild the setup I had and I have three months’ worth of photos to go through yet).

My old job still needs to be taken care of until a replacement is found, so I now have two jobs – which means I’m not doing either of them up to what I would consider a decent standard. This is, of course, a cardinal factor for stress, since the thing that annoys me the most is not doing things properly, regardless of deadlines and whatever other folk are responsible for.